Writing Prompts – Creative Copy Challenge #337

Summer is coming. So is Super Special Issue #338! This Thursday, join us for a mad writing prompts party! Don’t bring anything except your appetite and the love of a challenge: “What has been going on since CCC #328?”

No spoilers, okay? If you figure it out, you can tell us on Thursday…

This is a writing prompt. Bet you can’t do it! Take the 10 random words below and crush writer’s block by creating a cohesive, creative short story! And remember: after (if) you finish entering your submission into the comment field, highlight your words and click the bold button to make them stand out and help you determine if you forgot any words. (If you’ve missed previous writing prompts, we BET YOU CAN’T do those, either.) NOTE: Our bolding plugin is gone, so you’ll have to put <b> and </b> around each of your words if you want them to stand out, but NOT REQUIRED THOUGH.

Monastery

Operate

Religious

Trunk

Interment – the act or ceremony of interring; burial.

Crematory

Item

Airliner

North

Silver

NOTE: Don’t copy and paste from MS Word. Use a program like notepad that removes formatting or just type in the comment field itself. Also, finish your submission, THEN bold the words. Thanks. (And don’t forget to tweet this and share it with your friends.)

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6 Comments on “Writing Prompts – Creative Copy Challenge #337”

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!
The drug kingpin of the North would not have been pleased to learn that his life was traded for 30 pieces of silver. The Whitman’s cutlery worked its way through the underground economy, where people of disrepute can always find someone to operate the crematory after-hours.

The former chemistry teacher would have been incensed to find his limbs unceremoniously chopped up and stuffed in a steamer trunk. He might have been relieved to know that his executioners weren’t going to duplicate his rookie mistake of dissolving his remains in the second-floor bath tub. Perhaps he would get a religious send-off, though he could hardly expect interment behind the monastery, could he?

His relief would have turned to horror upon discovering that, due to a comedy of errors, that trunk was making its way through Albuquerque International Sunport, where a cadaver dog was on duty. Both would wind up on the same Wayfarer Airliner and, in a final twist of irony, the trunk would become an item of interest after it snagged on a pink teddy bear and jammed the conveyor belt.

Exiting the SilverAirliner with a small roller trunk attracts little attention. No one asks about the items being transported across state lines to a remote location near the Canadian border.

The rental car bumps along the forgotten road heading north to a stretch of woods near a crystal clear lake. I remember the place well. It’s an annual visit for a solemn occasion. I park next to a faithful tree and a shovel and get to work. The earth gives way easily to my efforts and soon I have a sufficient hole.

The interment is private and without ceremony. No monasteries nearby to gaze upon or religious articles to pray upon the departed. Just me and two urns and the knowledge that two more of the missing will never be found. No one seems to suspect the CrematoryOperator.

This is way too long, so…sorry? I’m not really sure what the length restrictions are.

The airliner had caught fire 35,000 feet above the ground, as we were flying over north Vermont. This dumb teenager had gotten a lighter onto the plane, an old silver thing with a bible quote carved into the side. I guess he was the religious type, although it hardly mattered in the end. The lighter melted, quote and all, somewhere on the way down.
I think seven of us survived the crash…or maybe it was eight? No, the young Mexican woman was pregnant, that’s why. She kept talking about the baby, and how it must be crying, so it was a bit confusing. Anyway, seven of us survived. We saw an old stone building in the distance, so we made our way there. The old man insisted on bringing his huge trunk , and the kid with the lighter had a broken leg, so it was pretty slow going.
Turns out that the building was a monastery . The kid didn’t want to go inside, something about sin and fire, but he was getting pretty feverish and we didn’t mind him. In the end we had to carry him over the threshold. There was no one in the building, and there was dirt and spider webs everywhere, so we figured it was abandoned. One of the women went to look for water, and we laid the kid out on the altar, since it was the only flat place around.
I climbed up the bell tower to get a look around, but I couldn’t see any signs of life anywhere. We were in the middle of a forest, and if there were any humans anywhere I didn’t see any sign of it. I went back down and told everyone the news. They took it pretty well—someone had gotten her phone working, so the authorities knew a few of us had survived, and another woman had found an old well in the basement, near a big furnace—but then the kid started thrashing around on the altar and things turned sour quick.
The old lady was arguing with the old man. They were standing really close—I think they were probably an item —and she was whispering furiously and pointing at the kid. Finally, the man walked up to the rest of us and started talking. Turns out he was a doctor, or at least he had been at one point. He had mentioned to his wife that the boy had an infection in the leg, and she had insisted that he do something about it.
The kid was too out of it to make a choice, so we had to make one for him. The doctor said that if he amputated the leg, the kid would probably live, and if he didn’t, the kid would probably die. I thought it was pretty clear, but there were a couple of people who weren’t so sure. The pregnant woman just didn’t want to see blood, and the woman with the phone didn’t trust that the man wouldn’t let him bleed out, and another man supported her—he didn’t trust the doctor—and in the end it came to a vote.
Well, we voted not to operate . In my defense, I said we should, but no one but the doctor and his wife had seen an illness worse than the flu, and they thought it would clear up on it’s own. I guess in a sense it did—after he died, I’m sure the bacteria ran out of food and died pretty quick.
Things got rough then. I helped the doctor move the body into the cellar for the night, because we didn’t know how long we’d be there, and at least the body would decompose a little slower in the cold. The pregnant woman locked herself in the confessional, and the doctor yelled at us for a while. Eventually, everyone sort of just got tired and found their own corners to sit in.
As the sun started setting, I climbed up the bell tower again to look for lights. There weren’t any. While I had been gone, the woman with the phone had gotten up and lit some candles, so it wasn’t completely dark. The old woman found a couple of buckets, and she and the old man went down to the well. They were down there for a long time, and when they came back their eyes were red and they were holding hands. We all came back together and sat in a circle drinking water, then curled up near each other and went to sleep.
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of several people shuffling around. The candles had burned down to stubs, but the distrustful man was moving around and lighting more. He and the doctor were awake, along with the woman who had found the well. When I asked them what they were doing, they said that the young man wouldn’t have wanted to lie abandoned in the basement. They couldn’t give him a proper burial, they said, but they could do the next best thing.
The woman who found the well said that she had realized the big oven was a crematory . The man had seen the kid’s lighter before the fire, and he said the quote had been something about burning, so they all thought it was appropriate. I thought it might have been more about spite than about what he would have wanted, but it could hardly hurt him now, so I went down with them.
The oven was empty, but there was a pile of old firewood next to it. I and the young guy lifted the body into the top chamber, while the woman and the old man shoved the wood into the bottom chamber. The woman had a lighter, a cheap plastic thing from a gas station, and using her scarf as kindling she got the wood to catch. Afterwards, she and I left him to burn and went back upstairs. The old man and the young man stayed.
The next morning, we were awoken by the sound of retreating helicopter blades. I grabbed the mallet from the doctor’s trunk and sprinted up the bell tower. The bell was old and dusty, but solid metal, and very satisfyingly loud. The helicopter blades came back, bringing with them paramedics and officials in suits and rescue teams.
I don’t really remember anything between then and when we got back to civilization. I tried to put the whole thing behind me, focused on my job and the frankly fantastic bar scene in Austin. A few months later and only a few days apart, I got two emails. One was from the Mexican woman, saying that she had given birth to a gorgeous baby boy at a hospital in Austin, and that I should meet him. The other was from the dead kid’s sister, saying that the internment of his ashes was in a week at a graveyard just outside Austin, and that I should come.
I didn’t go to either, which balances out, I think.

During one of my long trips to some North Asiatic countries, I walked into several places; in which I met several cultures, people, and even different ways of life. Ones so different that are completely the opposite of the ones I am used to. I could figure out that in some places are kept these old-fashioned monasteries.
These, operate in such a unique way, a way which really impacted me, I was atheist and see how much they respect their Religion and goddess opened my mind.
There were some Religious guys who attended me during my stay. I had the lucky to be there when they were in sort of Special Week, called “Goddess Interment” in which they remove a kind of Dynamites from some Silver Trunks. They were ordered in a row, by the way I never saw before a row as tidy as that. Then the monks started to turning on these fireworks and throwing up to sky for giving thanks and show respect to their goddess. After all this marvelous spectacle ended, came in some Elders from the crematory bringing grabbed two jugs either one, after remove its cover they also release to sky, but now the ashes.
A middle-aged women whom I met there, told me that isn’t common a foreigner watch all this, it seems that the monks and people around there liked me.
The day after, the uncharged of the airliner I was member, told me that my flight was delayed by two days for technical issues. I thought it was the perfect opportunity to do what I had had planned.
I got rid all my Items which I bring to my trip, and decided to start my new life.
Nowadays I can say that I have a good life, I’m happy, feel complete, and an important detail; I become a monk since 5 years ago.